Organizational citizenship behavior: Comparing perspectives of supervisors and subordinates across four international samples

Abstract

A total of 431 independent supervisor and subordinate dyads from the United States, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong evaluated the perceived job role boundary of the subordinates. Participants rated the degree to which they agreed that the behavior described in the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) scale developed by P. M. Podsakoff, S. B. MacKenzie, R. H. Moorman, and R. Fetter (1990) was an expected part of the subordinate's job. Each supervisor was paired with only one subordinate, and all participants held the same jobs in the same company but with branches in these 4 nations. The scale used was found to have conceptual equivalence across all subsamples. Results indicated that supervisors had broader definitions of job roles than subordinates. Participants from Hong Kong and Japan were also more likely to regard some categories of OCB as an expected part of the job than were participants from the United States and Australia.